[atlantaprog] Re: Country players

Alex wrote:

You have your EVHs and then your Randy Rhoads players who evolve to the still good but slightly less talented Warren DiMartini's and Adrian Vandenbergs. Still really good guitar players. However, then you evlove into (or maybe it would be DEvolve) Poison and Warrant! BTW, the guitar players in Warrant didn't play their solos on record. Studio guitarists recorded those solos, and the guys in Warrant then learned them for playning live. Sweet! THe coolest guitar part on a Warrant album was the acoustic intro to Uncle Tom's cabin, which was played by someone also not in the band. I believe it was the singer, Jani Lane's, cousin who played that guitar part.

I saw Warrant live twice, in '89 and '92 or so. They were quite good both times, tight as their Spandex and with a decent groove and feel; I was fairly impressed. After all, they'd been the
biggest band on the Sunset Strip for a year or two before their first album came out; there
must've been some reason for it besides being pretty. I mean, there were much prettier bands
out there at the time. ;-) And they actually bothered to write complete songs, which you can hardly say these days, after the meme "recovering the groove is essential" got mutated, as memes do these days, into "the groove is everything and nothing else matters".

I have to think the lead guitarists could've cut it; I mean, surely they'd been playing those tunes
live already. But I suspect the record company didn't want to take any chances, and Warrant,
being rookies in the major-label biz, was probably a pretty malleable act, not given to fighting the
record company *too* hard. I understand that they wanted "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to be the lead
single and the title cut of the album that eventually got called *Cherry Pie*. It's as if the record companies had set them up to fail on purpose--not just Warrant, but the whole scene. I don't know. I do know that the whole thing could've been handled much better.

Poison, well we should all know that CC DeVille was the crappiest guitar player.

Even "the crappiest guitar player" is a helluva lot better than we've got now.

Anyway, so there you go. There are hair bands, and there are no-talent hair bands. The hair bands (D)evolved into the no-talent versions that ended up being the death knell of the 80's metal genre.

Which is too bad, because there's no reason it had to happen.

BTW, what about Extreme? And Winger? You can't call them "no-talent", y'know; the main reason they get such a bad rap is that shirt that "Stuart" wore on *Beavis and Butt-head*. But then *B&BH* was created by the sort of crypto-reactionary "alternative" Puritan that's the *real* problem anyway.



Other related posts: